Back to School!

Congratulations, parents, you’ve made it through another wonderful summer! Now it’s time to pack away the suitcases, finish up your summer reads, gather your sleepy children, and  head back to school! And as always, your Terrebonne Parish Library is there to support you all the way through the new school  year! Be sure to visit mytpl.org/student to find collections of resources for your child’s age group, from “early learning” to high school.

Even the youngest children can benefit from the library’s online resources. Visit Tumblebooks for fun, animated picture books that read aloud with your child. Tumblebooks has resources for children from early learning to advanced levels, and includes not only picture books but chapter books, nonfiction, and graphic novels as well. A special “math stories” section features tales designed to get your children thinking about math through lively stories about counting, fractions, and even geometry. There are also books in Spanish and French to aid little language learners (and big ones too!). A beautiful collection of short streaming videos from National Geographic, on topics ranging from space to geography to history, is included in Tumblebooks. Looking for something a little more interactive to capture your kid’s interest? Try Tumblebooks’ “puzzles and games” section.

Another great resource for elementary aged children is Britannica E-STAX. If your child has a report due and you don’t have time to go to the library, Britannica E-STAX can be a lifesaver. Over 300 high quality, fully illustrated ebooks are available 24/7 to stream or download. Features such as keyword searching and automatic citation make these books even easier to browse than their physical counterparts. Students can also bookmark pages, highlight, and create notes in these ebooks and save the notes to their online “folder” for later reference. Similarly, Word Book Ebooks has interactive ebooks that can be borrowed for 21 days.

Middle and high school students will find a wealth of information they can use for reports and projects on Gale Virtual Reference Library. This expansive collection contains the full text of encyclopedias and reference books on a wide range of topics, including religion, history, literature, culture, and much more. The pages can be downloaded as PDFs and printed right from your home computer. Also of note for high school students, TumbleBookCloud contains a collection of always available ebooks, audiobooks, and graphic novels for the teen interest level - many of which may be required reading during the school year.

One of the best resources our library offers is free online tutoring through Homework Louisiana. Students of all ages (kindergarten through college) can contact a live tutor from 2 PM to 10 PM Sunday through Thursday. Students can upload worksheets or images of problems they are working on and the tutor will walk them through their homework problem. Help is provided with math, science, writing, ACT/SAT prep, and many other topics. Homework Louisiana is available in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese. An app is available for both Android and Apple based products.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of resources your library has to offer. So when you’re done filling those backpacks with new boxes of crayons, tissue, and notebooks, don’t forget to share these fantastic resources with your friends and family! We’re hoping we can help make this the best school year ever for you and your kids!